Human remains recovered off South Point in Worcester

Authorities cannot confirm that body is that of missing woman

Mar. 11, 2014

Helen David / Ryan Putney Image

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Staff Writer

OCEAN CITY — Human remains have been located in the same marshy area off Route 611 where an elderly woman went missing last spring, but authorities cannot confirm the identity of the deceased.

The badly decomposed remains were found Sunday night submerged in a mosquito ditch by a waterman, according to Lt. Ed Schreier, spokesman for the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office.

Worcester County Bureau of Investigation and evidence technicians were out Monday recovering what’s left of the body. The human remains will be sent to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore and for identification by dental records or a DNA match, Schreier said.

Schreier said he cannot confirm the remains belong to 77-year-old Helen David, who disappeared from her South Point home on Memorial Day last year.

Law enforcement searches at the time involved sweeps by state police helicopters, as well as shoreline searches by the Maryland Natural Resources Police and dive team units. Police also brought in two civilian canine search-and-rescue teams to assist. Last fall, authorities completed another shoreline search with negative results, Schreier said.

The recovery site is about a half-mile north of David’s waterfront home, Schreier added.

David lived with her son on Carefree Lane, a private drive off South Point Road. Her son, Ryan Putney, told police he went to work at about 3 p.m. May 27, and returned at about 1 a.m. to find that his mother was gone.

He said there was no disturbance or sign of theft in the house. Putney also said his mother suffered from mild dementia.

Putney said in a June 2013 interview with The Daily Times that Carefree Lane was simply a long driveway until new emergency response protocols required that it get a name.

The driveway has three homes, all of which back up to the north end of Chincoteague Bay. Putney said he and his mother lived in one house, which used to be his family’s summer home when they bought it in the 1970s. A niece of David lives in a second home. The third home belongs to unrelated neighbors, who have been there about 40 years.

He said his mother remarried in the 1980s and soon relocated to the summer house, which she expanded to accommodate visits from extended family. She retired in 1988 from a commercial art supply business in Wilmington.

Locally, she had started her own native plant business here, which she was doing full time up until about five years ago, Putney said.